[00:00:03] Ray Latif: You're listening to the BevNET Podcast. I'm Ray Latif. I'm here with John Craven and Jon Landis. We're at BevNET headquarters in Watertown, Massachusetts. This is podcast number 49 and we are Post Expo West. How are you guys feeling?
[00:00:16] John Craven: I slept for like 14 or 15 hours Monday night, and then we had a nice snow day.
[00:00:22] Ray Latif: So I feel actually kind of rested now. It wasn't a snow day as much as it was a gross day. It was snow, ice, rain, now ice. It was way overhyped, by the way.
[00:00:32] Jon Landis: It was great to come back from sunny Southern California to some snow. Phenomenal show. Always love going to these things. I think it is like the Super Bowl for the food and beverage industry and, you know, always great just to run into some of our listeners. Our dear old friends. Our dear old friends. You know, lots of good energy. I think it'll take all of us here, you know, a week to get back to normal, but... Yeah.
[00:00:58] Ray Latif: Yeah. We don't have a week on the edit side. We have two weeks worth of coverage that we have to pump out.
[00:01:02] Jon Landis: I said a week to get back to normal. Yeah.
[00:01:05] John Craven: You guys have a lot of work to do. Yeah.
[00:01:07] Ray Latif: Yeah.
[00:01:08] John Craven: I'll say I'm, I'm physically recovered, but mentally like people are talking to me about expo still. And I, I still can't process the same thing, but it was very, very easy.
[00:01:19] Ray Latif: I got a mind like a steel trap. You also got a mind like a Chewbacca head rusted shut.
[00:01:23] Jon Landis: That's true. He's wearing a hat with a Chewbacca face on the back and a fish shirt, which is your fish shirt collection is impressive. But anyway.
[00:01:32] Ray Latif: Speaking of Expo West, we recorded a great interview at the show with a man that some of you might know. He's a guru, as it were. That's Dave Asprey. He's the founder and CEO of Bulletproof. Bulletproof is best known for their butter and brain octane oil infused coffee. If you don't know what brain octane oil is, you're not alone. It's a secret recipe that the folks over at Bulletproof put together. But they claim that by drinking their coffee or drinking at least the recipe as formulated by Bulletproof, you will be smarter and you will have more energy and you will be better off as a human being.
[00:02:12] Jon Landis: Yeah, I think Dave's story is truly an interesting one. I would encourage anyone listening to this who isn't familiar to look it up. But also just, I mean, it's a really cool company and that you have something that is very heavy on direct consumer all the way down to, you know, they built these series of conferences that they do. And it's just really different products with a specific purpose. And Dave as the founder and spokesperson is like a living, breathing version of what happens when you use their products. I mean, he's just so like... I don't know. He's an intense dude, right? And I think even as we were talking to him, like when we were done, you know, we were, I don't know, Ray was complaining about his throat and, you know, Dave's got like a fix for it. You know, he's just somebody who's thought through all of this stuff.
[00:03:02] Ray Latif: The unfair advantage, the shots.
[00:03:04] Jon Landis: Yeah, a product called Unfair Advantage, which I'm not going to lie, was a little, you know, scary to take this little tube from from Dave that said unfair advantage on it. Although I think someone else I ran into at the show saw that I had it and was like, I buy these all the time. They're amazing. Which, you know, again, just speaks to how passionate people are about their products.
[00:03:24] Ray Latif: We also have a great interview with Jim Hoagland. Jim Hoagland is the chief operating officer of Ito En North America. Ito En is one of the largest producers of premium tea in this country. They're also very Deep in the matcha beverage trend that's going on, they have a line called Matcha Love, and they sell ready-to-drink beverages, they sell powdered teas, they sell regular bagged teas as well, they have cafes. And so we thought to talk to Jim about what's going on with matcha and why it's such an important and hot trend right now. And he has a lot to say about it.
[00:03:58] Jon Landis: Yeah. And he's just an all around chill dude. You know, I think it's, it's great to sort of hear from Jim, just in terms of the innovation and then in that, you know, they're a company that I think just given their resources, you know, being a large Japanese company and you know, that being a hotbed for tea, they seem like they're always out there looking for, you know, what's next. So, you know, they're always great folks to, uh, to talk to. And Jim's a great spokesperson for them.
[00:04:25] John Craven: And a lot of folks that focus on tea, a lot of these tea suppliers and other people, I've heard from a number of them, they consider that Ito En to be kind of like for their RTD bottled teas, like the gold standard for shelf stable tea. Definitely.
[00:04:39] Ray Latif: Yeah, they had a pretty interesting product expo too as well, or several new cold brew teas that were all pretty fantastic. And Jim touches on that as well in this interview. And I forgot to mention today's St. Patrick's Day, or at least this is the St. Patrick's Day edition of the BevNET podcast.
[00:04:56] Jon Landis: Do we have a green splash?
[00:04:57] Ray Latif: Well, matcha, you know, what better way to... Oh yeah, we meant to do that too. What better way to... Celebrate St. Patrick's Day that, as it were, with some matcha.
[00:05:04] Jon Landis: I'm not sure Irish people would agree with that, but we'll go with it. Okay, we'll go with it.
[00:05:08] Ray Latif: Pot of matcha at the end of the rainbow?
[00:05:10] Jon Landis: Pot of matcha. Gross.
[00:05:12] Ray Latif: All right, let's start things off with Dave Asprey. All right, an extra special interview here. We're at Natural Products Expo West 2017. We're at the Bulletproof booth, and we're joined by the founder and CEO of Bulletproof, Dave Asprey. Dave, how are you? I'm really well. Thanks so much for having us here at your booth, which is pretty nice. Oh, thanks. We put a lot of work into the booth, wanting people to really see what we are. Yeah, yeah. And what are you? I mean, I think Bulletproof is pretty well known in Southern California at this point. It's kind of making its way east. But for those of our listeners who don't know what Bulletproof is, could you give a brief introduction?
[00:05:49] Bulletproof Nutrition: Sure. Bulletproof is a company that came about from my own path of losing 100 pounds and having my brain not work. And I realized after years of hacking my body, spending a million dollars on getting tests and on doing pretty much everything under the sun to see what worked and what didn't, that there are some things that we were missing in our food supply. And it comes down to the quality of the food and what the food does for you. So Bulletproof is a company that's built around human performance. We make food that most importantly makes you feel amazing. Tastes good, is convenient, and then is affordable. Whereas everyone else in the food business generally says, how cheap is it and how good does it taste? And can we label it as healthy? I don't care if I can label it as healthy. I care whether people eat it, are full and satisfied and have functioning brains for hours afterwards. That's what we do. And so your formulation is pretty unique. It's highly unique. And we do things based on the fields of anti-aging and molecular biology and biochemistry. that maybe aren't what paleo people would have done or aren't what a vegan diet would look like. And it's about precision. It's about understanding the system of food, the system of coffee. And it turns out by changing some things way back in the supply chain and creation of coffee, we can make coffee that doesn't have the jitter and crash that a lot of people experience with coffee. We can make food that doesn't leave you hungry two hours later. You eat one of our bars, you're good till your next meal. They're engineered that way from the very selection of the ingredients all the way to how it's composed and how it's put together. So you eat it and it gives you a food high.
[00:07:18] Ray Latif: So, you know, in terms of the butter, the oil and the coffee, what's what's sort of unique about your ingredients versus, I guess, other products that are on the market? Sure.
[00:07:30] Bulletproof Nutrition: I invented Bulletproof Coffee and last year there were 48 million cups of Bulletproof Coffee sold. It's changed breakfast North America. People have lost, at this point, it's safe to say more than a million pounds using Bulletproof.
[00:07:41] Jon Landis: And that's just to be clear, 48 million cups of your Bulletproof, not the...
[00:07:46] Bulletproof Nutrition: There's no other Bulletproof. This is a registered global trademark. Nothing else labeled as it. So anyone who wants it, my take on this, I reach 10 million people a month with my blog, Bulletproof Nutrition, Webby Award winning, New York Times bestselling author kind of stuff. So very big reach. When you put milk in coffee, you take away the most precious part of coffee, the polyphenols, you cannot use it. So when I started writing, I assumed that companies would put butter in coffee and it would be an upgrade for the world. Like, butter is always better. But it's not Bulletproof Nutrition put butter in coffee. You're still getting mold toxins in your coffee, which are neurotoxic, which do inhibit human performance, and I've got a study about that that I'm presenting on stage here at the show. And then, instead of coconut oil, which makes your coffee taste like a pina colada, coconut oil doesn't give you neuron energy in your brain. It's from something called ketones. When you use brain octane oil, which is about 5% of what's found in coconut oil, it raises blood levels of compounds that suppress hunger very dramatically. So there's lots of people who put lots of weird stuff in lots of coffee that isn't processed the right way. They just can't call Bulletproof, and if they do, I have a good legal team.
[00:08:50] Dave Asprey: There you go.
[00:08:51] Ray Latif: You mentioned there are 48 million cups sold. I don't think all of them were at your cafes. Oh, no. But you do have two cafes right now in Santa Monica.
[00:09:00] Bulletproof Nutrition: We have more than that, believe it or not. Oh, do you now? We have our main flagship location in Santa Monica. OK. And we've got one in downtown LA. There are two locations at the LA Galaxy Stadium. So whenever there's an event there, there's bulletproof locations there.
[00:09:13] Jon Landis: Very cool.
[00:09:13] Bulletproof Nutrition: There are, let's see, a little bit more than half a dozen in the Seattle area. So basically, companies with lots of programmers have bulletproof locations on campus because they're actually seeing a difference. We've got some more opening in New York City, another three plans, so we're expanding it.
[00:09:29] Jon Landis: So three standalone stores in New York City. Yep. Very cool.
[00:09:32] Ray Latif: Very cool. You also have a pretty robust online business. I'm assuming that's what you also mean in terms of number of cups consumed as well, right? I'm looking at total coffee and oil consumption through all channels. Yeah. So how is your online business kind of progressed sort of in comparison to the growth of your cafe business?
[00:09:50] Bulletproof Nutrition: The online business is easy to scale, and cafes are very hard to scale. The number of employees to double e-commerce is nominal, and the number of employees to double cafes is exactly double. It also requires a lot more capital in order to open a new shop, so I'm really selective. The reason we're doing the cafe strategy is that the things I talk about, about not being hungry, not wanting breakfast, not having cravings for the first time maybe in 20 years, from one cup of Bulletproof Coffee, it sounds like someone's trying to sell you something. But here's the deal, if you look at me, I don't look like I used to weigh 300 pounds and be obese. Definitely not. No. And it works, and it takes away the effort of dieting. So I just want people to try it once. You walk into the store, you've never heard of the brand, you drink my coffee, made with the mold-free beans, which is really important so you don't get that coffee anxiety feeling, made with brain octane, and all of a sudden they're like, it didn't taste gross, in fact it tasted creamy and delicious, and I feel like I won a feel for the first time in years. Then they realize, Bulletproof coffee is a gateway drug to changing everything about their environment and changing everything about their biology. I just want to show people how they're supposed to feel.
[00:10:56] Ray Latif: Yeah. And I can vouch for the delicious and creamy. I've got some right here. It's pretty tasty stuff. And it's interesting because there's no sugar in it. There's no sweetness to it. And I know that's a big part of your strategy and your perspective on how people should be consuming food and beverages.
[00:11:12] Bulletproof Nutrition: I want people to consume whatever makes them feel the best and look the best and live the longest and just have the most energy. And I'll tell you, when people eat sugar all the time, they don't do any of those things. It makes them weak, it gives them cravings, it makes them emotionally less stable. So you're basically not as nice of a person when you put sugar in your coffee. I don't like it that it's that way. I want to put sugar in corn syrup and everything else in my coffee, except it doesn't work. I would love to see you put some corn syrup in your coffee. I just wouldn't drink it.
[00:11:39] Ray Latif: Get your Instagram stories ready.
[00:11:40] Jon Landis: I know, right?
[00:11:41] Ray Latif: There you go. You also have an RTD beverage, a bottled beverage that's a water drink, an enhanced water product called Fat Water. You launched it in 2015. You unveiled a revamp of the product last year at Expo West. It's being sampled here at the show right now. Tell us about the formulation of that product, what you're trying to do, and how many people are you trying to reach with it.
[00:12:00] Bulletproof Nutrition: Fat water is there because throughout the history of water, we've pretty much been putting either artificial sweeteners, which are terrible for you on all sorts of levels. They actually cause obesity, even though they don't have calories in them. Or we've been putting sugar and corn syrup and other things in these waters and calling them water. They're glorified soda. Fat is back. In fact, if you do a look at searches for high-fat versus low-fat, people are searching more for high-fat foods now on Google than they are for low-fat foods. So the world has woken up mostly because of social media, because of watching people like me lose 50 or 100 pounds and enjoying the process instead of suffering through it. So they don't want sugar in their water. They've actually woken up to the idea that fat is a high energy fuel and it makes you feel amazing when it's the right fat. So when they see fat water, either they're like, Oh, I want that. Or they're completely curious because who the heck would put fat in water? So no matter what, they're going to pick up the bottle, they're going to try it. And we use brain octane, our proprietary ingredient and brain octane oil. in the water, they feel it. They like how they feel. This is all about what the food does for you, not just how it tastes. It tastes good, too, though. Yeah. In terms of the revamp itself, what did you want to change about the packaging, about the formulation? One of the things when we reformulated, I wanted to amp up the flavor, and I also wanted better bottles. The experience of opening the bottle is really important. How it looks on the shelf is really important. It's a crowded, competitive space. So being able to have exactly the flavor profile, I thought we could do better, and we did. Yeah, I would say so as well.
[00:13:31] Jon Landis: And you guys have a lot of other product innovation. It seems like you just constantly have new stuff, right? Can you talk about just sort of your approach to innovation a little? And I don't mean that in a negative way. I mean, it's impressive that there's, you know...
[00:13:42] Bulletproof Nutrition: I've spent 20 years in Silicon Valley disrupting industries. The company that held Google's first servers, I was a co-founder of a part of that company. And I've seen wave after wave of disruption. And I've also spent years hacking my brain with computers stuck to it to turn on innovation and creativity. So my challenge is that I have a deal with my product and my R&D teams where I'll give them the ideas, but they don't have to do all of them and they don't have to do all of them now. So our roadmap, we could load it up as much as we wanted, but we're focused on four areas and only four areas because having focus is what drives success, right? And the four areas are coffee. Our coffee is unique. People feel different. I've had thousands of people tell me I had to quit drinking coffee except yours. I can drink it now because they weren't feeling good on, quote, normal coffee. So that's number one. Then we've got the water. Water is something people do every single day. And then we've got bars. One of my challenges as someone who travels 125 days a year and flies around the world all the time, Airplane food sucks and quite often you just can't get food that makes you feel good. So then you eat some sort of fast food and then you feel crappy, right? And then you get cravings and then it just takes you out. You're not where you wanted to be. So the collagen protein bars that are full of brain octane as well suppress hunger and taste amazing. They're like just so good that you just want to eat them. So I wanted that for myself. And all of these products are things that I can't buy anywhere else that have a functional use in your life. So the bars are a big part of this. They're starting to be sold at some of the natural foods markets. They do very well online. And people always repeat buy them because they're a superior product. And it's all about how they feel when they're done. And they taste really good. The final thing is supplements. We've got oils. We've got the collagen protein powder from grass-fed cows. We're the first people to take that idea mainstream. It's far more effective and efficient than bone broth, where you have to boil bones and all. It takes a long time, but it's a lot more protein, too. We've got a special whey protein, which is enhanced with some bioactive peptide things. And then we've got a line of supplements that are targeted for different things people want, like to go to sleep better, to protect certain parts of their nervous system. In fact, one of the new supplements increases neuroplasticity four times better than exercise, and it's a pill. I'm not saying you shouldn't exercise, you should do both, but why wouldn't you? I do. So the idea is these supplements are mostly e-commerce. We've got one supplement launched nationally in one of the large natural grocers. And the rest of them, though, are there to support a lifestyle that says, look, My number one most important thing is how do I feel right now? How am I going to feel today? How much energy do I have to give back to my family, to give back to my job, to give back to the world? And if people realize I was going to take a supplement anyway, I just took the right one. I was going to eat a bar, but now I'm full and focused for hours. I was going to drink coffee. I'm going to put butter and brain octane in my mold-free coffee beans, and I feel different, but it's the same behavior. It's just upgraded.
[00:16:38] Jon Landis: So I guess staying within those four pillars, is there temptation to almost bulletproofify other types of food, too? I mean, I'm assuming that you live this lifestyle yourself. I mean, I know you do. So are there other ideas outside of that?
[00:16:53] Bulletproof Nutrition: There's tons more ideas. I wrote Bulletproof the Cookbook, which was carried nationally. And I have a new book called Headstrong that's just coming out now. And that's all about upgrading the battery system in your body so you have more energy. And all of those involve food and other things like that. So there's a lot of innovation in the food space. And what's happened in big food is that companies over the course of the last hundred years have consistently made trade-offs. They basically say, how do I make it cheaper? And when they make it cheaper, they inadvertently add things to the food that they don't know are even there or that they don't know have a negative effect. So, you might see a big company say, you know, cottonseed and or canola oil. Well, cottonseed oil and canola oil do different things to your brain. They do different things to your cell membranes. They're not the same thing. And what you have there is a buyer who's just going out to an exchange and saying, I don't really care. It just needs to taste oily, right? We would never do that. So every ingredient is chosen carefully. And they don't have to be perfect because if it's going to triple the cost of something so no one can afford it, I'll choose the best ingredient that's functional for our customers within the price point that they can afford. And that perspective is just missing from food. So I can take that and we could do almost endless variations of making foods bulletproof, but we're going to stick to these four categories for a while because that's plenty of space. I guess it sounds like there's a lot of opportunity though, no? Well, there is, and it's also an opportunity for other companies besides Bulletproof. When you look at what your food does for your customers, it doesn't just taste good. And if you get out of that rut that says cheap and flavorful and say, like, what's in it for them, it changes how you formulate your food. But more importantly, it changes what the food does to our ecosystem. Because of Bulletproof Coffee, there was a shortage of grass-fed butter a couple years ago, like a national shortage. And because of that, there is now more grassland in production. And grassland is far better for our environment, even with cows grazing on it. than corn land being sprayed with glyphosate and other toxic products. So what we're doing is we're shifting the food chain for us, which changes the environment. So I want every company to adopt these principles and say, what's in it for our customers? Because it sure as heck isn't just flavor. You can get flavor out of an eyedropper chemical bottle, but your customers are not going to like how they feel in 20 years. And you have like an ethical responsibility, at least in my mind you do, to do what's best for your customers first.
[00:19:11] Jon Landis: So are there other companies that you would point to that are doing it right?
[00:19:15] Bulletproof Nutrition: You know, it's an interesting question. I haven't really thought about it from that perspective. There are certainly some companies who are taking the idea of clean food, but they'll just label something as clean. Like there's a company out there using non-organic milk protein isolate, which is one of the cheapest protein ingredients you can get, with artificial sweeteners and calling it clean. So the problem is always, we'll say, honesty and integrity in advertising there, and we are all in the food industry up against this sort of gray, fuzzy wall of FDA and FTC compliance. I have compliance people in the company, and we're really careful and respectful of those boundaries, and sometimes it's frustrating because I'm like, wait, it's not legal to label brain octane oil as a healthy fat, even though I could provide Dozens of studies.
[00:20:03] Jon Landis: No such thing as healthy fat, right?
[00:20:04] Bulletproof Nutrition: Well, no, you can actually label unhealthy fats like canola oil as healthy fats because that's, I don't want to say the law, that's the regulation. And so it's frustrating there, yet there are many words you can use that imply those things that people use for things that are anything but healthy and nutritious and good for you. So it's a bit of a wasteland. And honestly, sometimes to recommend a specific company, I would want to talk with either their CEO or the supply chain people and vet, like, where did you get that ingredient? Do you even know where it comes from? Like, what is that natural flavor in there? Because that's the level of detail that's required if you're going to do all you can for your customers.
[00:20:40] Jon Landis: So you're a paranoid consumer then, I would imagine.
[00:20:43] Bulletproof Nutrition: I don't know that it's paranoia versus just aware. I used to weigh 300 pounds. I used to have brain fog all the time. I had to spend a million dollars in 20 years hacking all this stuff. So I live in this state of just high energy all the time. My brain works. I run circles around people who are 20 years younger than me. I stay up later than them, not because I have to, just because I can. I just feel good. And I never had that in my mid-20s. So, no, I'm not gonna introduce things that make me slightly weaker to save five cents on ingredient costs. Like, I just would never do that.
[00:21:15] Ray Latif: You mentioned you're very protective over the Bulletproof brand, but since the launch of your company, there've been a lot of sort of Me Too products out there trying to replicate what you're doing in terms of formulation and product development. What do you think of some of those products? Are they sort of helping your cause or are they kind of hurting the idea of what you are and what you stand for?
[00:21:35] Bulletproof Nutrition: When someone says, you know, putting butter in coffee is cool, it is changing the perspective on fat in the country and it's good for the world. If they try and conflate it with bulletproof, they are liable for that. And we have active lawsuits going over stuff like that. Like, this is a real brand. It's a real company. We're venture backed. And we're not just coffee. It's not just organic coffee. We went to Guatemala, went to Colombia, we put in new infrastructure to make coffee, and we test for 27 toxins in coffee using a set of tests that were hard to figure out. Like, that's part of our secret sauce, right? So, no, your coffee isn't bulletproof if you put butter in it. It's just better than it was if you put milk in it. And Brain Octane Oil is triple distilled in the US. It's only from coconuts. We don't have any orangutan juice. We don't kill, no palm trees, no deforestation in Indonesia, no Chinese manufacturing. So it is a very premium product. It is different than MCT oil. In the very early days of Bulletproof, we used to have this concept called disaster pants. It was an in-joke, because when you use MCT oil, which is what the knockoffs use, it actually causes gastric distress and literally disaster pants. Brain Octane doesn't do that, and it raises levels of energy in the brain higher than you can get from MCT oil. So I'm happy that someone recognized the merit and the value in my invention here. Just pick your own name, guys, for God's sake.
[00:22:59] Ray Latif: Well, I mean, in some cases you are seeing different names out there for whatever it is they're selling, whether it be butter coffee, bomb-proof coffee, whatever it is.
[00:23:07] Bulletproof Nutrition: We've seen bullet coffee, I guess, you know, getting a little closer, but... Oh, no, bullet coffee would be a legal claim there. A talk show host made a mistake there, but he corrected that mistake.
[00:23:15] Jon Landis: There you go.
[00:23:17] Ray Latif: So I gotta ask then, you know, if you see a lot of these bottled coffee products and packaged coffee products that are calling themselves, or at least, you know, not on the face of the product, but sort of referring to themselves as Bulletproof Style, why don't you guys create your own RTD coffee?
[00:23:32] Bulletproof Nutrition: Oh, we have, you'll see the pictures on the slides. RTD's coming out very shortly. Oh yeah? Yeah, and here's the issue. If you were to try one of those, and if they say Bulletproof Style on the label, I am done with that. Like, literally, third largest law firm in the country, and many millions of dollars in the bank and have me just spend it on the mark. There's also just a level of integrity. I wouldn't do that. I don't have Coca-Cola style water for a good damn reason. Don't hold back, Dave. Sometimes it's just super fans and that's fine and they're always cooperative and sometimes it's just integrity issues. So competition is normal and healthy, but you got to have your own name to compete. So, you got another part of that question, too, about... Well, I guess, you know, in terms of the RTD that you're coming out with... So, I've been working on RTD for three and a half years. The difficulty with RTD here is that the ingredients we're using, there's that old adage, oil and water don't mix. We got it to work in fat water, and every one of the, we'll call them the imitator type of products, they don't use the right oils, they don't use enough oils, and they don't stay mixed. So when we come out with this, it'll stay mixed, it'll taste great, and it'll actually work. It's shockingly easy to put coconut oil, and a little bit of butter and some sort of emulsifier of your choice in a can. It just doesn't work, it doesn't taste good. There's a layer of scum on the top. And I think that if people do try something like that, they'll understand the difference. It's also vanishingly easy to take coconut milk and add coffee to it. Cool, it's just not the same thing. It doesn't raise the levels of the things you need to raise in the blood. So you drink that, you'll feel okay. But you get four times more energy from the oils that we're using than you do from coconut milk. So it's not just about how it tastes, it's about how do you feel when you drink it. That's why Bulletproof has succeeded. It's because people try it, they feel the difference, and then they come back. You try the other stuff, say it tastes good, but I didn't feel it, you're not gonna come back.
[00:25:27] Ray Latif: Right, right. So when is this RTD product coming out?
[00:25:31] Bulletproof Nutrition: I don't want to give you an exact date, just because there's always variances in shipping dates and all that stuff, but soon.
[00:25:39] Ray Latif: Soon. Okay, well we should talk more about that at another time. Once again, I'm losing my voice. You mentioned that you're pretty well financed, and it seems like there's a lot of people that kind of want a piece of your business, want to get involved in the Bulletproof brand. What are you guys doing on that front, and trying to raise money for the future, and for the vast amount of money it's going to cost to get your RTD brand across the country?
[00:26:00] Bulletproof Nutrition: Well, we are in the late stages of raising our Series B, so that'll be a very substantial round. And the good thing is I used to work as a venture capitalist on Sand Hill Road in Silicon Valley. I'm talking with guys I've known for 20 years, and the brand is big. We have so much earned media, so much social media. that we can get the meetings with the very top tier investors. And then it's just a question of, you know, finding the right one. We've already found the right one. So it's just a matter of, you know, dotting I's and crossing T's. Stay tuned, I guess. Yeah.
[00:26:35] Ray Latif: Another thing to follow up on. Last question. This is your first time at Expo West. You've got, like I said, you know, a great booth. The place is buzzing like crazy here. You know, what are your expectations from this show? And, you know, what do you think about the overall kind of opportunity into the natural channel for Bulletproof?
[00:26:50] Bulletproof Nutrition: Well, the show's amazing, and there's so much happening in terms of just getting distribution for Bulletproof Nutrition now. One of our big strategies is big grocery distribution, and we've had great success with the grocery partners in Southern California. A lot of it's national. We're working with Whole Foods and Sprouts, and we're available in more than 1,000 locations at retail now. The Fatwater you're talking about? Oh, you're talking just for Fatwater, I'm talking for all the products. Oh, you're talking for all your products that are out there, okay. I don't think Fatwater's at a thousand locations yet, but we're focusing on Southern California for it, but it's also available by e-commerce. And as an entrepreneur, I can tell you the most profitable business is e-commerce when you get all the margins yourself. So if I was playing the normal bootstrapped company model, I would have only stayed with e-commerce and I would have had much higher margins. But we have a really big mission to change, like to upgrade the world's food supply because it really matters because people are nicer to each other when they're well fed. and because we'll actually have a healthier environment around us when the food chain is pure. So that drove a decision for us to go to retail, even though the margins there are frankly not very good. Everyone in food knows that. So what I did there is I sold a part of my company to investors. I took that money and I used that to reach more people, because I think it's important. But as a pure Wharton MBA, which is my business training, looking at the numbers, I could have stayed just in e-commerce, but this is a big mission, and it requires making it accessible via however people want to buy it, because it's important that they try it.
[00:28:20] Ray Latif: Pretty impressive and really exciting times here at Bulletproof. Can't wait to hear more about the brand and your foray going forward into changing people's lives one Bulletproof coffee at a time, I guess. Thank you so much. Thanks a lot for your time, Dave. Thanks so much. So I feel like we got a really great sense of who Dave is and what the company and the brand Bulletproof stands for. Jon Landis, where do you stand on this? I think you mentioned this is sort of that part of a trend that you're seeing in terms of food is medicine at Expo West and beyond.
[00:28:54] John Craven: Yeah, I mean, that's what I heard at that press panel. I forget exactly who it was. It might have been Back to the Roots or Siete. But just talking about how when people are treating their bodies better, if they get a cold even, they're turning to ginger and garlic and taking turmeric as kind of a preventative inflammatory type stuff. And people are just including these types of things in their diets to improve themselves. And that seems to be a major part of the Bulletproof message that I hear from Dave. I guess it's more subjective, you know, like mental improvement, mental acuity, but feeling is living. So if you feel better and you're going to live a better life, I'm not going to rain on anyone's parade for doing that.
[00:29:39] Jon Landis: Yeah, I think it's hard to argue with any of the stuff that he says. The question ultimately is, are Bulletproof's products the way to achieve that, right?
[00:29:49] John Craven: And are they like, I mean, I don't want to like start any fights, but I mean, are they truly superior to everything else? That's these Bulletproof style things where, you know, Dave is very, very, you know, upfront in saying that, you know, nothing is like what they're doing and they're leagues beyond these other ones. So I don't know, I'd say the jury is out on all that stuff, but it's good to hear his perspective for sure.
[00:30:13] Ray Latif: Yeah, speaking of biohacking and at least functional ways of improving your health, matcha is one of those thousands and thousands of year old ingredients that people have been using to treat a number of ailments and also to improve things like mental acuity even. And Jim Hoagland, once again, is a guy who's very deep and knowledgeable in that matcha intelligence, I guess, for lack of a better word. This is a really great interview and if you've ever had any interest about Macha and were afraid to ask, this is the one to listen to. All right. I'm sitting in a conference room at the headquarters of EON North America. I'm with Jim Hoagland, the COO of EON North America. Thanks so much for joining me.
[00:30:58] Silicon Valley: It's so welcome to have you visiting us here today. Thanks, Ray.
[00:31:00] Ray Latif: And thanks for having me. This is a pretty great office. You're here in an amazing neighborhood, a really fast-growing neighborhood of Dumbo down under the Manhattan Bridge overpass. Yeah, I got that right.
[00:31:10] Silicon Valley: You got it right.
[00:31:11] Ray Latif: In Brooklyn, pretty up-and-coming area, pretty up-and-coming space. And you guys are sort of a perfect company for it because you're sort of doing some really progressive things in the tea space, including matcha. Matcha has been on the radar for the beverage industry for some time, but what you guys are doing is really trying to establish and pretty much are in a leadership position within that space. You sell ready to drink matcha, you sell powdered matcha, you sell culinary matcha, you have matcha cafes. What's the thinking behind really establishing that presence and that kind of leadership position in matcha?
[00:31:51] Silicon Valley: Yeah, it's a great question. And, you know, we've, as a company, we've had matcha. We have a long kind of tradition and a history of having, you know, a whole variety of Natural Products, obviously focused on green tea, but also with matcha. And, you know, historically we were selling matcha in the United States in a Japanese label, which had a niche, especially among, you know, tea aficionados who really were looking for that high quality tea or matcha. We introduced the Matcha Love brand as a way to try to make matcha more accessible. So as you mentioned, we've got everything from, you know, matcha love ready to drink teas to the cans that are a little more functionally positioned, culinary matcha, ceremonial grade matcha, four different grades of that, including organic, and then also some matcha powders that it's really driven more by convenience. So someone who's looking for an easy way to make a smoothie, whether it's a consumer or a larger pack size that's, you know, used in food service establishments.
[00:32:46] Ray Latif: Yeah, we're surrounded. Literally, when I got into the room, pretty much every Ito En product is on the table here. And there's quite a bit of matcha products. What is it about matcha that's really captured a moment at this point in time? You know, what is really resonating with retailers and consumers about matcha?
[00:33:05] Silicon Valley: It's kind of interesting when you and a lot of people talk about it kind of capturing a moment or it's a trend right now in the US. It's got such a long history dating all the way back to the samurai in the 12th century that would consume matcha as a way to get energy. And if you flash forward to today, It's the same reason consumers are looking for healthy energy. So matcha gives you kind of this calm energy. That's what really differentiates it from an energy drink that's got a lot of artificial ingredients or someone who's just drinking coffee where they're getting a lot of caffeine and you get that rush, but then you also get this crash. One of the benefits of matcha, in addition to the fact that it's so nutrient rich, because you're consuming the entire tea leaf. So the entire tea leaf, it's specially grown tea, it's called tencha. So in that grinder, like the one we have here, you're grinding up the entire tea leaf. So when you consume it, you're not only getting all those great nutrients, You're also getting caffeine and you're getting L-theanine, which is an amino acid that kind of counters that caffeine. So you get the pick-me-up from the caffeine, but it doesn't impact your nervous system where you get that jittery feeling. So it's more of a calm or more of a controlled energy. So whether it's the samurai or someone in Lower East Side today that's going into a matcha cafe, drinking matcha, it's all for the same reason. They want that focused, calm energy.
[00:34:23] Ray Latif: There's also benefits of antioxidants of matcha as well. How much of that plays into consumer thinking?
[00:34:28] Silicon Valley: It's a good question. I think it depends on the consumer. Obviously, a lot of consumers are looking for energy and they're looking for healthy energy. So they're paying more attention when they're going into a convenience store and they're picking up a can of energy drink. They're looking at that long list of ingredients. and saying, maybe this isn't really what I want to be putting into my body. So I think it's a combination. You know, some consumers are just looking for the energy, but a lot of them are also looking for a healthier beverage. You know, one of the things that I think differentiates us, whether it's with our T's tea line or our traditional line, the Oyochas or the matcha products, You know, in our teas, tea unsweetened, there are three ingredients in there. It's tea leaves, water, and vitamin C. Very clean, very healthy product. Same with the matcha, the matcha love unsweetened type products. And then the cold brew, which is the one that we're going to be launching at Expo West in about, I guess it's two weeks away now.
[00:35:20] Ray Latif: Yeah, it's getting pretty close to Expo West and I'm looking forward to trying those for sure. We wrote about them, I think it was a couple of weeks ago. The other thing about matcha that's really interesting is that people have been supplementing green tea for coffee drinks for some time. I mean, it's always been like the healthy alternative. even more so than just regular tea, I always hear people turn to green tea. Do you see matcha as sort of replacing coffee for a lot of folks, or do you think it's something where it's sort of supplementing or a secondary beverage?
[00:35:52] Silicon Valley: Two years ago, I might've said yes, but since we purchased a coffee company, I'm not going to say that it's replacing coffee.
[00:35:57] Ray Latif: I figured you might, that might be your answer.
[00:35:59] Silicon Valley: No, you know, I think it's a, I think it's a combination. Um, I think some people may or may not want caffeine or energy delivered in the form of coffee in the morning. Like a lot of times I'll have tea or matcha in the afternoon. because I don't necessarily want coffee and I'm a coffee addict. I drink a lot of coffee in the morning, but in the afternoon. So I think for some people they're substituting with different day part, depends on the time of day. And then you've got some people who just don't want the caffeine delivered from coffee. So they're drinking matcha in the morning. I think it's a personal choice.
[00:36:29] Ray Latif: The other part of it is that, you know, you have the traditional way of making matcha, which is grinding up the tea leaves. We have, you know, the beautiful grinder in front of us. And some people talk about the traditional preparation as being so integral to consumption of matcha. Has that really factored into the expansion of your portfolio as it relates to matcha? And what do consumers think about a ready to drink version versus even say, you know, a powder or a teabag?
[00:37:01] Silicon Valley: That's a good question. And I think it comes down to convenience for a lot of consumers. So some people have a ritual where they want to take the time and they're going to, you know, get a beautiful matcha bowl, and they're going to get the whisk, the cha sen, and they're going to prepare it the traditional way. It takes a little bit longer. So, you know, maybe Monday to Friday when you're trying to run out the door and get to work, you might not have time to do that, so you might just want to grab a matcha shot. So, again, I think it just depends on how big a factor convenience is in an individual consumer's life. You know, a lot of the matcha powders or culinary matcha consumers are using in a smoothie, so it's easy for them to just add the culinary matcha to a smoothie if that's part of their kind of daily habits of having a smoothie.
[00:37:42] Ray Latif: As far as the competition out there, you mentioned, you know, you see cafes in New York. There's a few other ready to drink matcha brands. There's matcha tea bags out there. Has this been something that is sort of helping growing awareness of matcha or is it something where there's a wide differentiation of what is and what isn't?
[00:38:05] Silicon Valley: Yeah, it's a good question. And there's kind of two parts, I guess, to my answer. Number one, I love the competition because there's so much education to do in the category. A lot of consumers don't know what matcha is. A lot of the trade doesn't know what matcha is. I love telling the story. We were at a trade show a year, year and a half ago, and some buyers from a chain that I won't mention came up and said, oh, you guys have matcha. This is great. We really need matcha. Our customers are looking for matcha. We want it. Oh, by the way, what is matcha? So they knew they wanted it. They knew that there was a consumer demand out there for it, but they had no idea what it was. So I think as we see more competition, that's a great thing because that means we're educating, you know, more and more folks. On the flip side, one of the negatives are people who are potentially just taking green tea, grinding it up. So creating a green tea powder and calling it matcha. For us, that's not matcha. Matcha has to be grown a particular way. It's shade grown. for the last 20 days. So for a high quality Japanese matcha, it has to be not only grown a certain way, but then also processed a certain way. So I think continuing at that education is really important. And that's one thing that we're really committed to doing, not only with consumers, but also with the trade. And that's also why I'm so excited and happy to be talking to you today about matcha.
[00:39:19] Ray Latif: Yeah, and being authentic and being transparent about how ingredients are grown and processed is becoming of greater importance to consumers. You recently launched a new campaign for matcha love that really focuses on the healthy energy aspect of it. How much of the backstory of how matcha is grown and processed fits into that campaign and future campaigns?
[00:39:42] Silicon Valley: To be honest, the campaign itself is really more focused on the consumer and trying to make that emotional connection with how it fits into their lifestyle. So the stay grounded campaign that we previewed at the Fancy Food Show is really focused on tying that product benefit to the consumer and what the consumer is looking for. The vertical integration and the fact that, you know, that picture up on the wall, those are tea fields in Japan. So we're vertically integrated. We own the tea farms. We just this past year opened up another tea processing facility in Kobe. That gives us not only a point of differentiation and a better cost position in the market, but it also gives us control over the quality, which is so important to us, whether that's with a matcha product that we're making or with one of the ready-to-drink Natural Products or tea bags that we're making. So that vertical integration really becomes important. From a consumer standpoint, all they really care about at the end of the day is the taste and what's the quality of the product. So our campaign is really focused on delivering, making that emotional connection with a great tasting product.
[00:40:42] Ray Latif: And function.
[00:40:43] Silicon Valley: Absolutely. Function goes without saying that they expect that.
[00:40:46] Ray Latif: Yeah. The functional aspect of it is, you know, for me, pretty obvious. In the Stay Grounded campaign, you know, once again, you talk about it being a healthy energy. It's a way to maintain strength and I guess energy, for lack of a better word, throughout the day without the crash that you talked about that you sometimes get with caffeine from coffee. Beyond that, all of your products, for the most part, at least through the Matcha Love line, are all unsweetened. You do have one canned product that does have some sweetness to it. How are consumers responding to that? Is sweetness in matcha and in tea something that is becoming sort of a taboo like it is in other segments of the beverage industry?
[00:41:29] Silicon Valley: I don't think so. You know, I think there are a lot of consumers who are looking for a product that doesn't have any sugar in it, but they're also an enormous part of the market that are still just moving away from sodas and carbonated soft drinks or fruit juices that have a lot of sugar in them. So when we look at our sweetened products, we kind of see those almost as a gateway to helping them to get to the better, healthier products that are the unsweetened ones. You know, every now and then in the afternoon, I might have one of the sweetened products just because I want the sugar and I want a little bit of the pick-me-up from the sugar, but we've struggled historically with the sweetened products, as you know, because it's not our, it's not kind of our forte, at least historically it hasn't been. It's really been the unsweetened. So we're excited about the sweetened products that we have right now. They're lightly sweetened with organic cane sugar, but I think there's a place for them in the market.
[00:42:19] Ray Latif: That's the other thing I wanted to bring up, you know, or the organic nature of what you do for Matcha Love. What impact does organic have on differentiating what you sell versus what else is out there on the market?
[00:42:29] Silicon Valley: The way we've kind of started looking at the brands is really trying to differentiate. So with our T's Tea brand, moving all that to organic, because that's really, you know, the competition where we have most of that product and distribution is more in natural and specialty. So the competitive set that we're going up against nine times out of 10 is organic, and that's where the market's moving. The traditional line, which is really focused more on the authenticity of bringing that traditional exactly like the OYOCHA brand is obviously not organic and we don't anticipate that that would be. It's positioned differently in the market, still super high quality, again, because of the vertical integration we're controlling. the tea leaves that are going in there, selecting specific ones for color, for aroma, for taste, and getting that special blend so that when you pick up a bottle of Oyocha today, whether that's in New York or Tokyo or a year from now, it's going to taste the same. So a lot of focus and a lot of attention goes into the quality there. Matcha love, we just felt like because of the dynamics and the consumer that's really drinking matcha and driving a lot of this trend, they want organic. That's what the millennial consumer is looking for. So we decided for that brand that we would source organic and it would be exclusively an organic brand.
[00:43:39] Ray Latif: Okay. Last question, you know, I touched on function and I touched on, uh, you know, added sugar or sweetness for that matter. One of the other things that's really on trend is fizz, carbonation. And, uh, we've seen some tea companies launch some carbonated options. We've even seen some, some coffee companies of late get into some carbonated offerings. Put you on the spot. What do you think about carbonation and tea? And do you think that's something that's in the future for Eto N?
[00:44:07] Silicon Valley: Again, good question. You know, when we look at our innovation roadmap, I'd be lying if I didn't say it was on our innovation roadmap, but it keeps kind of getting pushed out. I kind of have a big question mark next to carbonated on tea. We've looked at some of the data. We've talked to some of our retail partners. Last week, we were in New York meeting with one of them up in New York State. They did not have a glowing endorsement for the carbonated tea category. So, you know, we'll continue to look at the category, talk to our retail partners, get feedback. It's on that roadmap, but there are a lot of other things on our innovation roadmap as well.
[00:44:39] Ray Latif: Great. Jim, this has been a lot of fun. I feel like every time I talk to you about matcha, I learn a little bit more and hopefully our listeners will learn a little bit more as well. And those who, you know, may not know anything about matcha are really getting a better sense of what it is and beyond that, what Ito En does and what it stands for. So thanks so much for this.
[00:44:57] Silicon Valley: That sounds great. Thanks for the opportunity, Ray. I appreciate it. All right.
[00:45:02] Ray Latif: Jim, I think everyone can kind of gauge from that interview, is a really easygoing guy who, for me, is a really great ambassador, not just for matcha, but also for the beverage industry in general. I think he's really approachable. He's willing to talk to you. He's willing to be straight up with you about anything. And I encourage any listeners, if you have an opportunity at a trade show or otherwise, to go and talk to Jim. You won't regret it.
[00:45:29] John Craven: I love talking to Jim at those shows. Uh, him and a couple of the guys there are just such geeks for this stuff. You know, it's fun. You know, they want entrepreneurs doing matcha stuff. They want this to be proliferated. They want everyone drinking it every day and they don't, you know, obviously it's preferable if it's their company's product, but they're really just out there selling, you know, matcha for what it is and anybody out there who's also working in the same sphere of influence is they want to know you guys, because they really just geek out on this stuff.
[00:46:02] Ray Latif: They do. And again, it's one of those things where Ido Wen is really trying to take that leadership position in matcha. And it's still a growing, emerging ingredient. And I think they're doing a really good job with it. And they're really helping build out that ingredient for the rest of the industry, for sure. All right, you may have got this for yourself, you may have figured this out for yourself, but we still haven't recovered fully, or I haven't recovered fully, my voice hasn't fully come back. But I hope that hasn't hurt your podcast listening experience. If it has, I promise I'll be better next week. Crickets, all right.
[00:46:40] Jon Landis: I just wanna keep making you talk more and more. God, I mean, it's funny at these shows, like just, you know, the amount that we talk is insane. And, you know, to be under the weather in any way at all really makes that complicated because, you know, you really have no choice.
[00:47:04] John Craven: So... And if you're just shaking hundreds of hands every day, it's almost inevitable that we all get a little... Yeah, I try to cough with my hand before I shake, too.
[00:47:13] Jon Landis: But it is what it is. Like I was saying in the beginning of this, I'm sure I'll recover in another week or so.
[00:47:20] Ray Latif: Yeah, but I wouldn't want it any other way. I mean, aside from the illness and losing my voice, seeing everyone at the show, shaking hands, talking to people at length, these are the kinds of things that we love to do. And we encourage you to continue doing that. If you didn't see us at the show, please shoot us a line, email us. We'd love to talk, catch up on all kinds of things going on with your brand and just life in general. So, once again, thanks so much for listening. If you have any questions, comments, concerns, ideas for future episodes, please send them to podcast at BevNET.com. Until then, we'll see you next time. Ciao.
[00:47:52] Jon Landis: Thanks.
